keeping_up_with_the_petersons epitome of incomprehensibility So. The friend I had a crush on even though I know: a) he has a girlfriend b) even if he didn't, I suspect he and I are actually too alike to get along in close quarters ...is helping me out in the "no longer liking him" department. It isn't that he's mean. He continues to radiate kindness, which is an attractive force. It's just that he has questionable choice in role models. Specifically, conservative people with the last name Peterson. Jordan Peterson I'd heard of before. Toronto prof. He's been in the paper a couple of times; a blog I follow has poked fun at him. He wrote a self-improvement type of book, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but his grand narrative seems to be that millennial individualists are ruining culture. And who's his biggest fan base? Young people. Mostly white men, I think, because his complaint against individualism is a coded way of saying that marginalized people are just playing the victim card because they want to be special. I guess I can understand the sympathetic aspects. Self-improvement is popular. There was also a case in Ontario where a young TA was punished for showing a Peterson video in class. The way she was told off seemed unfair, but it doesn't make sense to conclude that Jordan Peterson himself was oppressed. The guy wasn't there. He wasn't punished. Now there's another Peterson he (crush-guy) told me about - Jesse Lee Peterson. By now, this is getting a little tiring. How many conservative Petersons can a person allude to? Anyway, he's a black American pastor who he seems to think that racism is a thing of the past and Donald Trump is great. At least, that's what it seems like. I watched one of his videos where he did a casual survey segment and it's not clear at first what his views are. He was asking people on the street what they thought of Trump and Obama and kept asking people to elaborate their point of view. Many of them gave short answers, but when one guy with dreadlocks did explain his views in detail, the video editor sped up his voice so it sounded weird and squeaky. It was a funny effect, but it seemed against the purpose of the interview format. Charitable reading: Peterson or his video editor was making fun of the fact that this guy was talking for too long. Uncharitable reading: It was a view opposed to the interviewer's, so he mocked it. And this man, the guy with dreadlocks, gave the most coherent explanation of his views out of the people there! (Here it is - the interview with the person who doesn't think Donald Trump should get credit for giving more black people jobs is around 7 mins. in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVd0kWmEAwM) Conclusions: a) I waste too much time on YouTube b) I fall in love too easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zrSoHgAAWo c) #NotAllPetersons 180729 ... unhinged (jordan petersen seems tame to me compared to the far right douchebags in state and federal government in this country. ive watched several of his appearances on joe rogans podcast and i didn't find him that bad at all) 180731 ... e_o_i Yeah, compared to the other Peterson he's not politically far right. I guess it's his philosophical outlook and pro-unfairness views that bug me. I'll put the unfairness first because relates to the second. He's used his platform to say that transgender people aren't really their gender, that the whole idea is a symptom of an individualistic society, so in turn he doesn't have to call them by the pronouns they want. This is... some sort of logic. If a person decided they were a horse, say, another person might not want to go along with that. But the fact that people like him make that sort of comparison in the first place ignores a lot of medical and anthropological evidence for gender dysphoria, etc. Plus it's just unfair. I guess it's the point of non-binary genders where things get unfamiliar to me, and at first I wondered if it was "just" a trend. (But a "trend" is not necessarily superficial; it means a tendency). I only know one person who calls themselves non-binary and I keep thinking of them as "he" still. And this isn't a know-well situation; they're a friend of a friend (see, I wrote "he's" first instead of "they're"). Of course there's no grammatical reason against a "they" that's either singular or plural. "You" made that shift a few hundred years ago. The only thing that'd be changed is "themselves" - add a "themself" and you're done, nothing new in the grammar table. Also, "they" for "general singular person, gender unidentified" - to replace something like "the reader" or "the student" - is used casually and is becoming accepted by grammarians. ...Gah. I ramble. I KNEW I'd take this to grammar somehow. Anyway, what I'd say to Jordan Peterson is that gender is like being a Democrat or Republican in the U.S. Yes, there's a binary, in that most voters are either one... but not everybody is, and sometimes people switch. As an aside, switching who you vote for is one difference between United States and Canada that actually exists. I mean it's not unheard of in the States, but it's more common in Canada. Anecdotal example: My father's family in Maine were Dem voters as a matter of course. Then he moved here where people are far more politically promiscuous. When there was a Progressive Conservative party, Mom voted for them while he voted NDP. The next election my brother and I could vote: he voted Conservative while I voted Liberal. Mom I think voted Liberal too, and Dad was NDP again. Next election, after a bunch of Stephen Harper, my brother changes gears and votes for the Green Party, I vote NDP, and Mom and Dad Liberal. I guess this is just the Page Where E_o_i Rambles. Anyway, Jordan Peterson wouldn't be open to the Gender is Like Democrats and Republicans argument because he makes money telling other people that nuance is chaos and postmodernism, all the while making up his own categories with abandon. E.g. he lumps postmodernism in with social-justice movements and Marxism. These are all different things and they're often opposed - Marxism comes from Marx, postmodernism comes from Freud on acid, they don't really get along. ...Okay, so I may be biased. I don't like philosophical postmodernism that much either (seems impractical, often unscientific), but I am definitely for intersectional social justice. Marx? Not enough info. My brother is the socialist one. For all my talk about practicality, I know more about humanities stuff than politics/economics and rarely DO things. 180731 ... unhinged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBwfUrD0id4 180805 ... e_o_i The climate chart in the video puts things in perspective. The thought of humans massively upsetting the balance of life on earth has the potential to displace worries of "I like him and he doesn't like me," doesn't it? Or else it the displacing thought has been, "I like her and the her-liking-me-like-that-status is unconfirmed but unlikely." Because it turns out there's more than one person in the world I can have an unrequited crush on. At least it's better than obsessing over being disorganized, maybe. 180821 what's it to you? who go blather from